T220 Silver - Uncut Edition

[Pat R]

Originally Posted by steve B

I think the figure I saw for the 1910 era flatbed presses was around 800 sheets and hour.
There's a reason the rotaries killed off the flatbed presses so quickly.

The ones we had I think could run about 4000 sheets/hour.

The new ones.... 15000/hour up to 21,000/hr!

And remember, they were doing around 8 colors plus the backs, and there had to be some drying time in between, so figure about a week and a half from blank to finished cards IF they used multiple presses because I can't imagine changing the stone on a flatbed that size was a quick task.

ALC and Hoe were pretty close, Hoe had some rotary typeset presses that were multi color and fed from a roll of material. I have to really organize my thoughts and write them up, but there's a bit of evidence that a 2 color press was used. Which is really interesting because supposedly the first rotary offset litho press was invented in 1910.

Hoe wrote a book mostly self serving in 1902 covering the history of presses, mostly the ones made for typography and newspapers. Those were much faster.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/6354...-h/63545-h.htm

Edward Hett invented a multi color rotary sheet press in 1899 and he sold his invention to American Lithograph.

01b.jpg


Here's the thread I posted about his invention and sale to ALC.

https://www.net54baseball.com/showth...ighlight=Press

[steve B]

Originally Posted by Pat R

Edward Hett invented a multi color rotary sheet press in 1899 and he sold his invention to American Lithograph.

Attachment 562118


Here's the thread I posted about his invention and sale to ALC.

https://www.net54baseball.com/showth...ighlight=Press

Damn, I must be getting old and forgetting stuff.

What's interesting is that most online histories of printing and lithography still don't mention Hett at all, but attribute the first rotary press with plates to someone else in (assuming I'm remembering it right) 1910.

I do wonder if Hetts press was built, or how and if it worked. I can see some potential problems, but there were rotary presses in newspaper work well before that. Just not lithographic presses.

[Pat R]

Originally Posted by steve B

Damn, I must be getting old and forgetting stuff.

What's interesting is that most online histories of printing and lithography still don't mention Hett at all, but attribute the first rotary press with plates to someone else in (assuming I'm remembering it right) 1910.

I do wonder if Hetts press was built, or how and if it worked. I can see some potential problems, but there were rotary presses in newspaper work well before that. Just not lithographic presses.

That's surprising because it's mentioned in 100's of newspapers from 1899 until his death in 1915 and although he is credited with other inventions the multi-color press is the one thing mentioned in his obituaries. The $300,000 that he received from American Lithograph in 1900 is equivalent to more than 10.5 million dollars today.

Multi color pressThe_Rushville_Recorder_Fri__Dec_8__1899_.jpg

Multi-color press inventor Salt_Lake_Telegram_Mon__Aug_16__1915_.jpg

[steve B]

I think it may be just the searches I've been doing.
Hetts press apparently prints directly from the cylinders, and I've been looking at offset presses, which are credited to Rubel just after 1900. Invented 1901, and in production by 1905.
https://www.si.edu/es/object/nmah_882246

Multi color offset presses are basically just two or more of those strung together with a common feed and output. And in some ways hadn't changed much into the 1980's.

I've been reading some of his patents, and they're very interesting. The printing cylinders were a copper tube with a cast zinc surface that could be used for several other types of printing. The patent I read didn't specifically mention lithography, but an article about it did. That use may be in a different patent, and the surface may have been something other than zinc, as I can't picture that being a good material for water retention. But who knows? I may have to experiment, zinc plates are used for etching and zinc plated plates for corrosion resistance, and they're not expensive.

More interesting to me but not at all applicable to cards, is that it looks like different types of printing may have been possible on the same machine.

[G1911]

Hyland's contract that never mentions tobacco at all seems to indicate rights were secured for more than just the primary purpose. It is certainly no accident that the verbiage gives permission for any and all use of his picture to the lithographers, not to the tobacco concern.

That the E229 sheets were found with the T220 Silver sheets strongly suggests that there is a printing relationship and these are probably a Brett production; it would be difficult to argue it is more likely that the unique production material just happened to come together into the same spot from what appears to be the items of a non-collector. The checklist is studded with athletes known to have given their rights to the tobacco cards. It is, as far as I am aware, impossible to know if these panels were for E229 or D353, but the cards are the same and probably produced at about the same time. One would deduce, from the discovery, that this is a late 1910 or early 1911 set, and the checklist strongly suggests a 1908-1912 timeframe.

First, here's some of their material from the period of the cards and the product.

In late 1910, National Licorice seems to have significantly upped their marketing, as I can't find much on the Y&S product line from the card backs. Here's a pair of ads, from December 1910. One shows their Y&S licorice gum; this ad with nothing but a picture of the box was run throughout 1910. The packages look to me smaller than would comfortably fit the cards, but there's no scale here. Some of these ads also ran in German language US publications, like "apotheker-zeitung", which looks like a catalogue of apothecaries.

This 1911 ad from the Spatula has some more detail into their marketing verbiage and medicinal focus.

A 1913 ad from the Pacific Pharmacist from Wm. DuVal & Co. was their west coast distributor, and their product had a wide range of geographic sale. West coast distributors, marketing to minority group publications, seems to have been sizable operation. There are numerous other ads from the 1910's easily found for their Y&S product line.

[G1911]

So we have the company, we have the panels, we have the deductive probability that these were printed alongside the tobacco cards and used the same permission letters used for T218. Earlier, though, we have deduced that their must have been an exclusive element to the T card agreement between American Lithography and it's probably-but-still-not-proven-beyond-doubt shadow subsidiaries, and the ATC and its subsidiaries. If there had not been an exclusive element, then there's no reason Knapp and team wouldn't have produced card images for other products, as it quickly spawned a fad and numerous small operations in the 1909-1912 timeframe started putting out their own, generally lower quality, card issues.

Either one of the deductions must be false, or National Licorice must be owned by the ATC. So I went searching.

National Licorice was a subsidiary of the American Tobacco Company. A November, 1907 issue of The Tobacco Worker contains much discussion of government action against the ATC, the case for the monopoly, and the companies involved. I will link rather than screen cap as there is much else here of interest for researchers beyond a single page, it goes into detail about the takeover of Bollman, the structure of the monopoly, and more. The part pertaining to National Licorice is on page 14 of the issue (page 305 in the pdf file of the compilation book here: https://books.googleusercontent.com/...KkC61ZBE6AH1-O.

It states that the Continental Company, which we have discussed in other threads as an ATC front, purchased the MacAndrews & Forbes firm, created a new firm of that name in New Jersey, and consumed the old firm as well as Mellor & Rittenhouse. Of the $3,000,000 worth of voting shares, the ATC owned $2,112,000. This company went into the business of importing licorice root and paste and selling licorice products. In 1902, MacAndrews & Forbes bought the Stamford Manufacturing Companies root and paste business, and Stamford agreed not to compete in that area of business.

In 1902, MacAndrews & Forbes (Owned by Continental, owned by American Tobacco) founded the National Licorice Company, which bought the businesses of Young & Smylie and F.B. & V.P. Scudder. Frederick Scudder seems to have been managing part of the company after the acquisition. National Licorice, their subsidiary, agreed "not to manufacture licorice paste to be used in tobacco products", i.e. a different subsidiary would be doing that part.

It is noted that two competitors were left by the end of 1902, and that the ATC's subsidiaries began to sell paste far under cost to drive them out of business.

So licorice's components were apparently used in tobacco, and licorice was dominated by the ATC as a result. The E229's were produced by the monopoly for a subsidiary firm (3 times removed from them), and thus the American Lithographic partners could and did produce cards for them.

[G1911]

This leaves D353. D353 is identical to E229, except for the different back. Attached is an example, E229 on the left and D353 on the right. These Koester Bread cards are more difficult than E229, which I wouldn't call easy.

Koester's cards must be:
1) Again, one of the previous deductions is wrong or

2) The cards are not from 1910-1911 but a few years later, a reprinting after the fall of the tobacco monopoly, like T214, T215, etc. by which time whatever agreement they had had with Duke wasn't an issue, or

3) Koester's was owned by an ATC owned firm or

4) The cards are a pirated issue, and somehow someone else stole the images and made cards with them.

I can find numerous ads and records of Koesters Bread in Baltimore in the mid teens and the early 1920's (they issued base ball pictures in 1921), they seem to have continued on for decades after this. According to a coupon they were founded in 1886. Not finding much in the 1910-1911 period yet.